Eliminating NTBS will promote economic integration

I will not pretend to be photography buff-especially since I own a beat-up 7MP camera and I have probably used it nine times in my lifetime-but I appreciate good technology when I see it and this is one of them: the Eye-Fi memory card. The Eye-Fi card is a wireless memory card for effortless uploading of pictures from a digital camera to your computer or phone and/or to social networks on the go. Picture a world where you can take pictures (with a digital camera) at a wedding event, immediately share it with your friends on their smartphones and within the same minute update your Facebook profle picture-and all this without carrying your laptop and USB cord to the party. As if that is not enough, the card works from open Wi-Fi connections if the camera is more than 90 feet from the host computer. This means that if you are within range of a network, your photos and videos will fly to your computer or sharing site (say Flickr, Picasa, etcetera)-even if you are at say, the airport. In line with this, if you were in the middle of Akagera Game Reserve you could set up Direct Mode and directly transfer photos to your phone hustle-free. Eye-Fi is compatible with most cameras and the issue of running out of space is dispensed with when you activate endless memory as your card intelligently makes space once content is safely delivered to a computer or phone. The one feature of Eye-Fi that I find most mind-blowing is its geo-tagging feature that adds the location where the photo was taken to the image (Geotagging is the addition of geographical identification metadata to a photograph; this data consists of longitude and latitude coordinates). Not only does this make it easy for the person snooping through your pictures to know where you took them, it is very useful for security purposes in terms of tracking your camera if it is stolen. As was the case of one Eye-Fi user in Los Angeles (USA); his camera was stolen but the minute the thief starting using the device, all the photos taken were automatically uploaded to his computer including the locations the photos were taken enabling police detectives to use this information to nab the thief. Not unlike cell phone triangulation that is currently used by Rwanda police to curb phone theft, this tracking technology is only the beginning of tracking technologies that will make tech thieves’ lives more difficult if embraced by law enforcement and I most certainly look forward to that. akintore@gmail.com